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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a
Research Agenda
Eugene McCanna
a
Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University,
First published on: 29 October 2010
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of
Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda
Eugene McCann
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 20:30 19 January 2011
Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University
This article proposes an agenda for research into the spatial, social, and relational character of globally circulating
urban policies, policy models, and policy knowledge. It draws on geographical political economy literatures that
analyze particular social processes in terms of wider sociospatial contexts, in part by maintaining a focus on the
dialectics of fixity and flow. The article combines this perspective with poststructuralist arguments about the
analytical benefits of close studies of the embodied practices, representations, and expertise through which policy
knowledge is mobilized. I suggest that the notion of mobilities offers a useful rubric under which to operationalize
this approach to the “local globalness” of urban policy transfer. The utility of this research approach is illustrated
by the example of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is frequently referenced by policymakers
elsewhere as they look for “hot” policy ideas. The case also indicates that there is much research yet to be done on
the character and implications of interurban policy transfer. Specifically, I argue that, while maintaining a focus
on wider forces, studies of urban policy mobilities must take seriously the role that apparently banal activities
of individual policy transfer agents play in the travels of policy models and must also engage in fine-grained
qualitative studies of how policies are carried from place to place, learned in specific settings, and changed as
they move. The final section offers theoretical and methodological questions and considerations that can frame
future research into how, why, and with what consequences urban policies are mobilized globally. Key Words:
geographies of knowledge, globalization, policy transfer, urban policy, urban policy mobilities.
Este artı́culo propone una agenda de investigación del carácter espacial, social y relacional de las polı́ticas
urbanas que circulan a escala global, de los modelos de polı́ticas y el conocimiento sobre polı́ticas. El artı́culo
se apoya en las literaturas de economı́a polı́tica que analizan procesos sociales particulares en términos de
contextos socioespaciales más amplios, conservando en parte enfocada la dialéctica de fijeza y flujo. El artı́culo
combina esta perspectiva con argumentos posestructuralistas sobre los beneficios analı́ticos de estudios cerrados
sobre prácticas intrı́nsecas, representaciones y experticia, por medio de las cuales se moviliza la polı́tica del
conocimiento. Mi sugerencia es que la noción de movilidades ofrece una útil rúbrica bajo la cual operacionalizar
este enfoque para la “globalidad local” de transferencia de polı́tica urbana. La utilidad de este enfoque de
investigación se ilustra con el ejemplo de Vancouver, Columbia Británica, Canadá, una ciudad que con
frecuencia es referida en otras partes por los gestores de polı́ticas, en tanto andan a la caza de ideas “cálidas”
sobre el particular. El caso muestra también que existe todavı́a mucho por investigar sobre el carácter e
implicaciones de la transferencia de polı́ticas interurbanas. Especı́ficamente arguyo que, al tiempo que mantienen
a la vista el interés por fuerzas de mayor amplitud, los estudios de movilidades de polı́ticas urbanas deben
considerar seriamente el papel que juegan las actividades aparentemenmte banales de los agentes de transferencia
C 2011 by Association of American Geographers
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(1) 2011, pp. 107–130 Initial submission, November 2008; revised submission, February 2009; final acceptance, March 2009
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
108
McCann
de polı́tica individual en los desplazamientos de los modelos de polı́ticas, y deben también comprometerse en
estudios cualitativos de grano fino sobre la manera como se mueven las polı́ticas de lugar en lugar, aprendidas
en escenarios especı́ficos, y transformadas a medida que son movilizadas. La sección final formula interrogantes
teóricos y metodológicos y consideraciones que pueden ayudar a enmarcar investigaciones futuras alrededor del
cómo, por qué y con qué consecuencias se movilizan globalmente las polı́ticas urbanas. Palabras clave: geografı́as
del conocimiento, globalización, transferencia de polı́ticas, polı́tica urbana, movilidades de polı́tica urbana.
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 20:30 19 January 2011
I
n 2003, Vancouver, British Columbia, architect
Bing Thom was hired by the Tarrant County,
Texas, Water District to design the Trinity Point
Plan, a development and flood control project for riverside land on the edge of downtown Fort Worth (Thom
n.d.). The plan’s defining features are the creation of
a new channel in the Trinity River, which will control floodwaters and thus open 500 acres of floodplain
to new development, and an emphasis on residential
density, much of it in apartment blocks, mixed-use zoning, environmentally conscious design elements, and
waterfront walking paths. The plan was the downtown element of a larger federal and local effort to
manage the Trinity River watershed. From the beginning, Fort Worth’s planners were keen to emulate the
good planning strategies they saw in waterfront redevelopment in other parts of North America. Downtown business interests were also receptive because they
hoped to replicate the success of waterfront real estate development in San Antonio (Richardson 2002).
Therefore, the existing institutional context in Fort
Worth made hiring someone like Thom likely from the
beginning.
Thom, for his part, reflected the need for consultants
to tailor their proposals to the locality in which they
are hired when he argued that his design was “uniquely
Fort Worth” (quoted in Schnurman 2004, 1F). Yet,
the architect also underscored urban planning and design consultants’ tendencies to transfer “best practices”
from elsewhere by noting that his Fort Worth design
would be directly inspired by the compact, residential
downtown planning that has recently made Vancouver
famous in global planning and design circles (City of
Vancouver 1997; Punter 2003). Vancouver’s model is
defined by “Living First” and “Sustainability” principles
that have produced a downtown core with one of the
highest residential densities and some of the highest
housing prices in North America. The model emphasizes bike and walking paths, a water orientation, and
mixed-use zoning and design intended to maintain attractive, lively streets. Fort Worth’s decision makers
saw this landscape firsthand when Thom’s firm organized a fact-finding visit to Vancouver. Such visits are
crucial for the learning process of potential clients. Indeed, to a Texas politician who participated in the trip,
Vancouver “had to be the model” for Fort Worth (in
Schnurman 2004, 1F).
This back-and-forth teaching and learning process
clearly had implications for Fort Worth. The benefits
on the Vancouver side did not only accrue to the architectural firm, however. The wider political benefits
of favorable attention from elsewhere are evident, for
example, to the Vancouver Sun’s (“Lone star inspiration” 2004a, I1) real estate column, which noted that
“[t]he civic worthies of Fort Worth, Tex. have turned
to Vancouver, via Thom, for inspiration in their goal of
improving the city’s quality of life.” Vancouver’s image
as an international inspiration for seekers of good development policy is a powerful political narrative that
valorizes existing development models in the city, legitimates the actions of Vancouver’s development coalition, and dampens criticism of the negative impacts
of the current policy—such as the city’s high housing prices and attendant unaffordability for the poor
and middle class (Blomley 2004; Boddy 2006; Eby and
Misura 2006; Gurstein and Rotberg 2006; Kane 2007).
This example of the Vancouver–Fort Worth connection highlights both the translocal activities of
architects (Olds 1997, 2001; McNeill 2009) and the importance of the intercity, cross-scale circulation of policy knowledge in the production of urban development
strategies and “restless” urban landscapes (Knox 1991).
It also underscores the role of private consultants, of
which architects are only one type, in shaping flows of
knowledge about urban policy and in transferring policies themselves. These are long-standing but increasingly important aspects of the production of cities, yet
they have not been adequately studied or theorized.
In focusing little on the specific processes and practices just described, urban scholars in various disciplines
have become increasingly concerned, in more general
terms, with how cities are produced in and through
cross-scale relationships—by flows of people, capital,
ideas, and so on (Harvey 1982, 1985; Massey 1991,
1993, 2005, 2007; Castells 2000; Graham and Marvin
2001; Smith 2001; Sassen 2002; Taylor 2007). A great
deal of this work recognizes that flows are not unmoored
from localities, regions, and territories. Rather, important geographical literatures on scale, place, global
cities, neoliberalization, and urban development have
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
grappled with the complex and mutually constitutive
relationships between urbanization and processes that
operate through and beyond cities, interconnecting
them with other scales (Marston 2000; Brenner and
Theodore 2002b; Wilson 2004; Hackworth 2006).
Two foundational insights underpinning these geographical literatures, alongside their adherence to social constructionist understandings of space (Lefebvre
1991), are Harvey’s (1982, 1985) notion of the productive tension between the fixity and mobility of capital
and Massey’s (1991, 1993) global-relational conceptualization of place. The former highlights the twin
imperatives of capital—to circulate and to be fixed in
place—and shows that this tension, and the seesawing bouts of investment and disinvestment in the urban landscape that accompany it, produces cities as
dynamic sociospatial formations. The latter emphasizes
that cities must be understood as relational nodes, constituted by the flows of capital, immigrants, information,
and so on, that tie them to other distant places. Place is,
in this conception, an “event . . . the coming together
of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes
rather than a thing . . . open and . . . internally multiple”
(Massey 2005, 141).
These key insights and literatures on scaled and relational places notwithstanding, the proliferation of
scholarship on the urbanization–globalization nexus has
not fully answered questions about the character and
implications of relationships between contemporary urbanism and processes extending through and beyond
cities. On the contrary, recent discussions of neoliberalization, for example, suggest the need for research
that adds empirical depth and theoretical nuance to
our understanding of the “actually existing” forms of
contemporary urban political economies (Brenner and
Theodore 2002a; Peck and Tickell 2002; Larner 2003).
Specifically, the global circulation of urban policies (formally drafted and adopted guidelines and procedures
setting out the long-term purposes of and addressing specific problems of governance), policy models (more general statements of ideal policies, combining elements of
more than one policy, or statements of ideal combinations of policies), and policy knowledge (expertise
or experienced-based know-how about policies, policymaking, implementation, and best practices) proliferates and, therefore, needs continued research, as recent
writing on “policies in motion” (Peck 2003; Ward 2006)
and “inter-local policy transfer” (Theodore and Peck
2000; Peck and Theodore 2001) suggests. Research into
the processes, agents, and institutions involved in mobilizing certain “hot” policy ideas—about the best way
to build a “livable” and profitable downtown water-
109
front, for example—offers clear opportunities to further
conceptualize and empirically detail our understanding of contemporary urbanization by tacking back and
forth between specificity and generality, relationality
and territoriality (Peck and Tickell 2002; Wilson 2004;
Proudfoot and McCann 2008; McCann and Ward 2010
forthcoming).
I outline a framework for studying the character
and implications of urban policy mobilities—socially
produced and circulated forms of knowledge addressing how to design and govern cities that develop
in, are conditioned by, travel through, connect, and
shape various spatial scales, networks, policy communities, and institutional contexts. My conceptual starting
point is to take seriously the fixity–mobility dialectic to
understand policy transfer not in terms of the voluntaristic acts of unconstrained, rational transfer agents
freely “scanning” the world for objectively best practices and not by focusing on and fetishizing policies
as naturally mobile objects. Rather, the circulation of
policy knowledge is paradoxically structured by embedded institutional legacies and imperatives (e.g., by longstanding policy paradigms, path dependencies, ideologies, and frames of reference or by external forces, like
political-economic restructuring, which often necessitate the easiest, fastest, and most politically feasible
transfers). These contexts condition the field of policy transfer as social, relational, and power laden (Peck
and Theodore 2008). Thus, the “demand side” of policy
transfer and the conditions under which adopters of best
practices—such as the federal agencies, local planners,
and downtown business interests who hired Thom to
“Vancouverize” Fort Worth—operate must be acknowledged in combination with the study of the practices of
“supply side” policy mediators, such as consultants.
Having taken this position, my specific purpose is
to (1) elucidate the connective tissue that constitutes
cities as global-relational nodes; the representational,
comparative, translatory, pedagogical, and ambulatory
practices through which contemporary policy experts
and consultants, city officials, academics, activists, and
other urban actors position themselves and their cities
within wider fields of interurban competition, cooperation, and learning1 ; and (2) conceptualize the role of
urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge in providing pathways for the transfer of urban
policy models and in shaping contemporary urbanism
and urbanization. The article is motivated by Peck and
Tickell’s (2002) call to “walk the line” between local specificity and an attention to global interconnection, by Peck’s (2003, 229) related argument for more
detailed conceptualizations and “descriptions of the
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McCann
circulatory systems that connect and interpenetrate ‘local’ policy regimes,” and by Larner’s (2003, 511) attention to the “apparently mundane practices,” agents, and
experts through which the global is produced.
The article’s next section describes the dominant
social science literature on policy transfer, one developed by scholars in political science, and critiques it for
its lack of full attention to the sociospatial and scalar
elements of these transfers. The subsequent section addresses this critique by proposing a conceptual framework that builds on certain elements of the “traditional”
policy transfer literature but bolsters it through the
introduction of insights from both the burgeoning literature on mobilities and also from poststructuralist approaches to government. The point is not to paper over
the distinctions between the political economy and
poststructuralist approaches but to acknowledge their
differences and limits while drawing out their complementary strengths when deployed in a specific context
(Larner and Le Heron 2002a; Le Heron 2007; Lewis,
Larner, and Le Heron 2008). This conceptual groundclearing leads to the case of Vancouver, which I use
to outline a perspective on urban policy mobilities that
focuses on the transfer agents involved, the specifically
intercity, rather than international, travels of policy
models, and the sites in which policies are transferred.
Urban development policy, as it is mobilized in and
through Vancouver is, then, a lens through which to
explore how urban policy gets done in global context—
through the prosaic routines, practices, technologies,
interpersonal connections, and travels of key actors,
who Stone (2004) referred to as “transfer agents.” This
approach emphasizes the situated nature of all global
flows, allowing a detailed investigation of how they
are performed in and through specific places, or microspaces, while also attending to their more general
influence (Burawoy et al. 2000; Larner and Le Heron
2002a, 2002b; McCann 2008; McCann and Ward forthcoming). Having illustrated how a situated, relational
conceptualization of urban policy mobilities and global
circuits of knowledge might usefully inform the study
of urbanization, the article’s final section outlines a research agenda built on a number of theoretical and
methodological questions and considerations that stem
from the previous discussion.
Policy Transfer
In analyzing the global travels of policies and the
circulation of policy knowledge, it is necessary to engage with the contemporary political science litera-
ture on policy transfer. The term policy transfer is, as
Stone (1999) noted, an umbrella concept referring to
the practices of national policymaking elites who “import innovatory policy developed elsewhere in the belief that it will be similarly successful in a different
context” (52)2 but also to the involuntary adoption
of new policies as the result of external pressures from
supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996; Stone 2000; cf.
Gilbert 2002) and to structural convergences and diffusions (R. Rose 1993) in the policy realm in which elites
play less of an initiatory role. Although the diversity of
processes to which policy transfer refers suggests that it is
a “chaotic conception” in Sayer’s (1992) sense, the term
has, nonetheless, spawned a significant literature that
seeks to model or theorize how the transfer process operates, create typologies of the actors and institutions involved in transfers, identify the power relations through
which adoption occurs, and specify the conditions and
mechanisms under which certain policy transfers succeed or fail (Bennett 1991, 1997; Robertson 1991; R.
Rose 1991, 1993; Wolman 1992; Dolowitz and Marsh
1996, 2000; Stone 1996, 1999, 2000, 2004; Evans and
Davies 1999; Dolowitz 2000, 2001, 2003; Radaelli 2000;
Wolman and Page 2000, 2002; James and Lodge 2003;
Evans 2004; Jones and Newburn 2007).
In developing their influential model of these processes, Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, 8) addressed the following guiding questions:
Why do actors engage in policy transfer? Who are the
key actors involved in the policy transfer process? What is
transferred? From where are lessons drawn? What are the
different degrees of transfer? What restricts or facilitates
the policy transfer process? . . . How is the process of policy
transfer related to policy “success” or policy “failure”?
This approach has, then, shed light on a number
of key elements of policy transfer. Yet, the utility of
this traditional approach to transfer needs to be considered critically from three angles. First, a reading of
this literature highlights the care needed when conceptualizing the identities and activities of transfer agents.
Those studying policy transfer expend considerable effort on identifying and categorizing these agents. The
“Dolowitz and Marsh model” (2000, 10), for example,
lists “nine main categories of political actors engaged
in the policy transfer process: elected officials, political parties, bureaucrats/civil servants, pressure groups,
policy entrepreneurs and experts, transnational corporations, think tanks, supra-national governmental and
nongovernmental institutions and consultants.” Stone
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
(2004, 556) also typologized a set of key agents: “Thinktanks or research institutes, consultancy firms, philanthropic foundations, university centres, scientific associations, professional societies, training institutes and
so forth.” The issue here is the balance between the
empirical description of transfer agents and the analysis of process and practice. Peck and Theodore (2001,
429) emphasized “processes of policy learning, emulation, and making” (see Peck 2006; Ward 2006; Cook
2008) that define contemporary policy and, certainly,
Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, 7) critiqued other studies
that “describe the transfer of ideas or policies between
countries but do not analyze and explain the processes
involved.” Nonetheless, a focus on typologies of actors,
and on models and definitions of what is or is not policy
transfer, allows the typologies and models themselves to
be reified, becoming the objects of debate rather than
facilitating analyses of the social processes that constitute policy transfer (Evans and Davies 1999; James
and Lodge 2003). Yet, it is clear that the identification
and categorization of actors is a necessary component
of studying the fundamentally social process of knowledge circulation in general and policy mobilities more
specifically.
A second critique of the traditional approach to
transfer is related to its tendency to focus on the
national scale (Hoyt [2006] is an exception). The
national scale limitation is clear in Dolowitz and
Marsh’s (2000) references to “countries” and “‘foreign’
models” that belie a particular conceptualization of
the institutional geography of policy transfer—one
that elides the various sites and scales, including the
urban, in and through which policies are produced. A
national approach fails to recognize that “cities . . . have
become increasingly important geographical targets
and institutional laboratories” (Brenner and Theodore
2002a, 21, italics added) for numerous policy experiments and that “as extra-local policy learning and
emulation is normalized . . . the effectiveness of policies
and programmes remains stubbornly dependent on
local economic and institutional conditions” (Peck and
Theodore 2001, 427). Stone (1999, 53) acknowledged
the important, if understudied, occurrence of transfer
“at the sub-national level: between states in federal
systems and across local governments, municipalities
and boroughs.” Yet, both she and Dolowitz and Marsh
(1996, 352) only went so far as to acknowledge
that interlocal transfers and learning can happen
within one national system. Thus, the policy transfer
literature maintains a problematic separation between
the domestic and the international, which does not
111
acknowledge that urban policy actors can act globally
in their own right, particularly in a contemporary
context where “state territorial organization . . . [has
been turned] inside-out insofar as its . . . goal is to
enhance and promote the global competitiveness of its
cities and regions” (Brenner 1998, 16).
A third concern is with the traditional notion of
“transfer” itself. As Peck and Theodore (2001, 449) argued, the term entails an “implicit literalism . . . which
tends to suggest the importation of fully formed, offthe-shelf policies, when in fact the nature of this process is much more complex, selective, and multilateral.”
Policies, models, and ideas are not moved around like
gifts at a birthday party or like jars on shelves, where the
mobilization does not change the character and content
of the mobilized objects. Although not all policy transfer literature falls entirely into this literalist trap—Stone
(1999, 57) noted, for example, that “the process of modification in transfer requires closer investigation”—it is
important to further detail and conceptualize how “the
form and function of . . . policies is prone to change as
they are translated and re-embedded within and between different institutional, economic and political
contexts (at the local and national scales)” (Peck and
Theodore 2001, 427).
From Policy Transfer to Urban Policy
Mobilities
My argument so far has been that certain characteristics of the policy transfer approach—its tendency
toward narrow typologies, its adherence to one or two
scales, and its tendency to fall into a literalist trap of assuming that little happens to policies “along the way,” or
“in the telling” as they are moved from place to place—
limit its utility in the study of how cities are constituted
as key sociospatial nodes within global circuits of policy knowledge. In this regard, it is necessary to draw
on the useful insights of the traditional literature but
to incorporate other conceptual vocabularies and perspectives so as to remain open to the array of agents,
practices, processes, socially produced (and productive)
scales and territories in and through which cities are
produced. Some of those working in the policy transfer
tradition, as well as geographers and others, have begun
to push the limits of the traditional approach (Wolman
1992; Gaffikin and Warf 1993; Stone 1999; Theodore
and Peck 2000; Wolman and Page 2000, 2002; Peck
and Theodore 2001; Peck 2003, 2006; McCann 2004,
2008; Hoyt 2006; Ward 2006; Cook 2008). I suggest
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McCann
that more can be done, however, by identifying elements of an alternative approach that can be found in
the contemporary literature on mobilities and in poststructuralist scholarship on the seemingly banal practices of institutional actors.
Numerous authors have sketched the contours of
a recent “mobilities turn” in the social sciences
(Urry 2000a, 2000b, 2004, 2007; Cresswell 2001,
2006; Heyman and Cunningham 2004; Sheller 2004;
Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry
2006) and begun to critique certain aspects of it (Ray
2002; Adey 2006; Binnie et al. 2007). The mobilities
approach focuses on, among other things, the various
ways in which humans are mobile, how people mobilize various objects, how technologies—whether mobile themselves or fixed in place (“moored”)—facilitate
movement, and on the stratification of mobility, identifying distinctions between “kinetic elites” (Wood and
Graham, quoted in Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 6)
and other less mobile groups, the relationship between
mobility and social exclusion and inclusion (Urry 2002;
Cass, Shove, and Urry 2005), and “how [the concept of]
mobilities enables/disables/modifies gendered practices”
(Uteng and Cresswell 2008, 1). These programmatic
and conceptual statements have inspired applications
of the notion of mobility or mobilities to a wide range
of topics, especially automobile travel and its associated infrastructures and cultures (Sheller and Urry
2000; Urry, Featherstone, and Thrift 2004; Hagman
2006; Freund and Martin 2007; Laurier et al. 2008),
air travel and airports (Cwerner 2006; Adey, Budd, and
Hubbard 2007; Adey 2008; Kellerman 2008), tourism,
convention, business, and spiritual travel (Sheller and
Urry 2004; Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen 2006; Bajc,
Coleman, and Eade 2007; Edensor 2007), and migration
or transnationalism (Conradson and Latham 2005; Ali
and Holden 2006; Conradson and McKay 2007). Although the range of applications can, on the one hand,
be seen as an indication of its analytical merit, the concept of mobilities has, on the other hand, been argued to
have “become a most elusive theoretical, social, technical, and political construct” (Uteng and Cresswell 2008,
1) and might be accused of being a “chaotic conception”
in its own right.
Nevertheless, I will show that mobilities, when employed judiciously, offers a worthwhile analytical lens
through which to study policies in motion. In general
terms, it
challenges the ways in which much social science research
has been relatively “a-mobile” until recently . . . [and]
problematizes both “sedentarist” approaches in the social sciences that treat place, stability, and dwelling as
a natural steady-state, and “deterritorialized” approaches
that posit a new “grand narrative” of mobility, fluidity
or liquidity as a pervasive condition of postmodernity or
globalization. . . . It is a part of a broader theoretical project
aimed at going beyond the imagery of “terrains” as spatially fixed geographical containers for social processes,
and calling into question scalar logics such as local/global
as descriptors of regional extent. (Hannam, Sheller, and
Urry 2006, 5)
This approach resonates with long-standing traditions in geography, represented by the work of Harvey
and of Massey, that emphasize the need to understand
the production of place in terms of fixity and mobility,
relationality and territoriality. More specifically, and
again resonating with geographical literatures, the mobilities approach questions the tendency toward reification and national state-centeredness in much of the
traditional policy transfer literature. It offers a vision of
society (and policymaking) as a multiply scaled, emergent social process. Furthermore, mobilities provide an
opportunity to think about the transfer, translation, or
transformation of policy models and ideas in terms of
the embodied practices across what Ong (1999, 159)
called “translocal fields of power.” Global circuits of
policy knowledge shape and are shaped by social connections made by actors sometimes at a distance—over
e-mail or by reading policy documents about policies
in other places—but, as Urry (2004) emphasized, these
connections also depend on the intermittent copresence of those actors in specific places (see also Larsen,
Urry, and Axhausen 2006; Le Heron 2007).3
Although the mobilities literature offers useful additions to the study of policy transfer, reference to other
literatures allows a sharper perspective on urban policy
mobilities by offering insights into questions of knowledge. First, circuits of policy knowledge are composed
of epistemic communities who transfer, emplace, and
utilize certain forms of knowledge as part of their practice. Economic geographers have a long-standing interest in questions of knowledge, learning, the global,
and the local. Debates among these scholars continue
around the relative importance to economic competitiveness of locally embedded tacit systems of knowledge, developed by and unique to spatially proximate
actors and institutions in specific “learning regions” or
“clusters,” versus codified forms of knowledge that are
accessible to economic actors in most locations (Vallance [2007] provides a clear review of this debate).
They offer resources to conceptualize the transfers and
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
uses of policy knowledge, specifically with regard to
attempts to complicate the tacit/local–codified/global
dualism (Amin and Cohendet 1999, 2004; Allen 2000;
Grabher 2004) and, in ways that Vallance (2007) argued parallel the mobilities literature, to emphasize how
economic knowledge circulates by being carried by specific actors and through processes of translation and
teaching (French 2000; Bunnell and Coe 2001; Coe
and Bunnell 2003; Thrift and Olds 2005).4 Central to
this and other literatures in contemporary geography
and urban studies is the network metaphor. Certainly,
global epistemic communities are networked and analyses that deploy the network as an analytical heuristic
have contributed a great deal to scholarship on power,
space, and the global. Space does not permit a review
of this approach here, as I am more concerned with
theorizing exactly how knowledge is mobilized in and
through territories, places, scales, and networks, without privileging any one of these dimensions (Jessop,
Brenner, and Jones 2008).
A second addition to the mobilities approach involves work by political theorists on the character of
knowledge, expertise, and governmental rationalities,
on the ways in which certain ideas become hegemonic
and global in contemporary society and on the actors,
practices, representations, and discourses that constitute knowledge and truth (N. Rose and Miller 1992;
Dean 1999; N. Rose 1999; Griggs and Howarth 2002;
McLennan 2004; Osborne, 2004). Some specifically geographical work on cities and localities, particularly
concerning various rationalities and technologies of
government, has stemmed from this wider literature
(Raco and Imrie 2000; Huxley 2002, 2006), but more
can be done in applying its insights to questions of contemporary urban policy transfer. The most convincing
combination of the insights and concerns stemming
from the types of economic geography and political theory discussed here has been developed by Larner and her
collaborators (Larner 2002; Larner and Le Heron 2002a,
2002b, 2004; Larner and Walters 2004; Le Heron 2007;
Lewis, Larner, and Le Heron 2008). Although this work
does not have an urban focus, it is particularly useful for
my purposes because it pays attention to the relationship among micropractices, microspaces, and globalization. Therefore, in what follows, I frame a discussion
of urban policy mobilities in terms of a combination
of the work of mobilities scholars and what Larner and
Le Heron (2002a, 418) referred to as “post-structural
political economies” involving “[s]ituated theorization
and method” (see also Burawoy et al. 2000; Herbert
2000).
113
A City in the World: Policy Mobilities in
and Through Vancouver
The merits of the approach just outlined can best
be explored through an empirical case study. Here I
use aspects of Vancouver’s relationship to global circuits of policy knowledge to illustrate my argument.
The discussion is based on an ongoing research project
that analyzes two fields of urban policy in Vancouver that have clear global relations: development and
planning policy and drug policy. In the interests of
clarity, I only discuss development and planning here
(but see McCann 2008). The research employs discourse analysis of a wide range of documents including government documents, newspapers, professional
publications, Web pages, podcasts, videos, and blogs;
interviews with key transfer agents involved in mobilizing policies; and ethnographic observation of various
settings where transfer occurs or is facilitated, including public meetings, conferences, site visits, seminars,
and lectures. The discussion represents an embryonic
attempt to develop a “global ethnography” of policy
transfer that investigates the processes, meanings, and
contexts of a single research site, and the governmentality of certain microspaces within it, to investigate the
mutually constitutive relationships, forces, and imaginaries that tie it to other scales (Burawoy 2000; Herbert 2000; Larner and Le Heron 2002a, 2002b; Lewis,
Larner, and Le Heron 2008).5
Who Mobilizes Policy?
I have suggested that care needs to be taken when
identifying important policy transfer agents because
there is a danger of calcifying discussion into typologies that hinder rather than facilitate analysis of social processes. Yet, the need to understand and identify who mobilizes policy is crucial precisely because
mobilities are social processes. This tension is evident in the way in which the practice and processoriented literatures discussed in the previous section
often parallel the policy transfer literature in producing
typologies of key actors. N. Rose and Miller’s (1992,
181) influential statement on governmentality argued
that, “[government relies on] designs put forward by
philosophers, political economists, physiocrats and philanthropists, government reports, committees of inquiry, White Papers, proposals and counterproposals
by organizations of business, labour, finance, charities
and professionals.” Developing a similar perspective,
Larner (2002, 663) specified a set of experts involved
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in the production of contemporary globalism. They
are a “new specialist elite.” “They range from international management consultants to small self-employed
entrepreneurs, . . . conference organizers, people in marketing, public relations and software development.”
Policy mobilities are simultaneously fixed in and mobilized through communities of social actors and their
associated institutions, such as those described by Rose
and Larner. Who might these communities of policy mobilizers be in the urban development context,
specifically? I identify three broad categories: local policy actors, the global policy consultocracy, and informational infrastructures. The broad category of local
policy actors includes policy professionals, like urban
planners, working within the state; private policy consultants providing services to the state; and civil society groups, including political activists and nonprofits.6
Each works in its own way as a “policy entrepreneur”
(Mintrom 1997), searching globally for best practices
to embrace, “cutting-edge” cities to emulate, and “hot”
experts from whom to learn but, as discussed earlier, always within externally, historically, and institutionally
imposed constraints (Peck and Theodore 2008). They
tap into and utilize extralocal connections—ranging
from official intergovernmental alliances to individual
relationships with colleagues elsewhere—to learn about
policy models and physically bring experts to the city
to inform locals about cutting-edge policies.
In seeking to create connections through policy networks and to mobilize policies from one place to another, local policy actors engage with what might be
called, following Saint-Martin (2000), the “global consultocracy.” This collection of individuals, firms, and
think tanks can be divided into two groups: incoming policy consultants—those who come to a city from
elsewhere to impart knowledge—and outgoing policy
consultants who, like Bing Thom, are based in one city
and present stories of its successes to people elsewhere
as part of their professional practice. The mobility of
these consultants and their tendency to gather information on best practices from various places to bolster
their own specific recommendations makes them particularly powerful conduits of information among far-flung
and, in many cases, quite different cities.
Policy mobilities are also facilitated by a range of informational infrastructures—individuals, institutions,
organizations, and technologies that interpret, frame,
package, and represent information about best policy practices, successful cities, and cutting-edge ideas.
Specifically, we can identify three distinct but related
groups: educators and trainers, professional organiza-
tions and supralocal policy organizations, and the popular media. Educators and trainers frame knowledge
about policy practice by formally educating new generations of policy actors in universities and colleges
and by engaging in midcareer professional development
training. They codify information about various policy
models and about the cities in which they have been
implemented, turning the attention of their students
toward certain urban development paradigms and their
associated cities. By conferring degrees and diplomas,
these educational institutions also credentialize and legitimate particular forms of urban policy expertise and
their related mental maps of good and bad examples of
policy (McCann 2004, 2008). The research of single
or small groups of academics can have a similar effect,
of course, as it can highlight and perhaps legitimate
certain mobilities and mental maps.
The professional organizations with which policy actors interact are also involved in the framing and dissemination of expert policy knowledge through their
awards, conferences, workshops, field trips, professional
publications, Web sites, and e-mail lists (e.g., American
Planning Association n.d.; Canadian Institute of Planners n.d.). The locations these organizations choose for
their conferences and the plenary speakers they invite
are also significant in that they serve to anoint certain
cities and certain policies as worthy of attention. A
similar informational role can be seen in the work of
supralocal policy organizations, such as the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, “UN Habitat.”
These organizations perform clearinghouse functions
not dissimilar to, but somewhat differently directed
than, national professional organizations. Like professional organizations, they confer legitimacy on certain
models and certain cities through reports, awards, and
decisions about where to hold conferences (UN Habitat n.d.-c). The popular media, as a third informational
infrastructure, play a similar role in the framing of urban
policy. They construct narratives and mental maps of
good and bad policies, cities, and neighborhoods and
repeat and popularize the findings of the experts and
organizations already discussed (McCann 2004).
In identifying these agents of urban policy transfer, I
build on, but also extend, the range of actors proposed
by the traditional policy transfer literature. In doing so,
I indicate that their activities and the global-relational
geographies they construct are often manifest beyond
the traditional bounds of the state, although never entirely divorced from its institutions. Furthermore, as
these actors create, maintain, and utilize the “fragile relays, contested locales, and fissiparous affiliations” (N.
Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
Rose 1999, 51) that facilitate policy mobilities, they
highlight an important geography of intercity circuits
of knowledge that do not necessarily match the paths
of international transfers.
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Intercity Policy Mobilities
In their discussion of the mobilities perspective,
Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006) agreed with
Brenner’s (2004, 66) argument that “the image of
political-economic space as a complex, tangled mosaic of superimposed and interpenetrating nodes, levels,
scales, and morphologies has become more appropriate
than the traditional Cartesian model of homogeneous,
self-enclosed and contiguous blocks of territory that has
long been used to describe the modern interstate system.” For them, “the nation itself is being transformed
by [various] mobilities, as is the city” (Hannam, Sheller,
and Urry 2006, 2). Interurban mobilities, linking cities
within the same nation state (Stone 2004) but also
connecting cities in different countries, are produced
through the activities of policy transfer agents. These
connections work in and through national state institutions when, for example, they organize and finance
international policy conferences like the World Urban
Forum (see later) or when embassy staff help facilitate
the insertion of “their” architects, planners, construction companies, and so on into other countries, as the
Canadian embassy has done in the United Arab Emirates (Lowry and McCann 2009). Crucially, as this article suggests, these connections also operate outside and
around national state frameworks.
Intercity interaction beyond the formal structures of
the national state but still influenced by national state
contexts is evident in the case of Seattle’s recent downtown planning process. In 2005, that city hired Ray
Spaxman, a former Vancouver planning director, and
Larry Beasley, who at the time was Vancouver’s codirector of planning, to evaluate a proposal that recommended changes in downtown development patterns
(Spaxman and Beasley 2005; see Bermingham 2005;
Langston 2005a, 2005b). Spaxman and Beasley drew
on their Vancouver experience by arguing for increased
density in Seattle’s core. In their report, they also explicitly addressed the similarities and differences between
the two cities. The first sentence of the report reads:
“Seattle and Vancouver are neighbours and our citizens admire much of what they see in each other’s city”
(Spaxman and Beasley 2005, 1). The report goes on
to set the terms for their intercity perspective by identifying a degree of commensurability that allows the
115
two cities to be considered benchmarks for each other:
“Vancouver and Seattle are kindred cities and we have
much to learn from one another. We are good neighbours seeking a good life. We share a similar climate,
a similar sized urban conglomeration and the same environmentally sensitive Georgian Basin in the Pacific
Northwest” (4).
Yet, the report does not only emphasize similarities
and learning opportunities. It also addresses differences
between the two cities, in the context of differences between Canada and the United States, again indicating
the fine line consultants walk between local specificity
and intercity comparison:
At the same time, we are also different. There are cultural, historic and legislative differences that need to be
understood and respected. Our two countries, although
similar in many ways, manifest divergent values and community aspirations. Our two urban economies are at different stages of development, and function in dissimilar
ways. We don’t want our cities to replicate one another
but we can positively influence one another. (Spaxman
and Beasley 2005, 4)
The report sparked debates in Seattle around the
question of whether Vancouver’s policies could, or
should, be imported (Boddy 2005; Dawdy 2005).
Although it is yet to be seen if the two downtowns
will develop in parallel, the Vancouver consultants’ involvement has meant that the political discussion over
the value of residential density in downtown Seattle
has been set in terms of the Canadian city while, as in
the case of Fort Worth, ongoing discussions over, and
adjustments to urban design policy in Vancouver are,
to some extent, conducted in terms of the popularity of
the Vancouver model in other cities.
These examples emphasize that an approach to policy transfer that involves only the analysis of interlocal
transfer within a particular polity, or the analysis of international transfer among national states, suffers from a
lack of appreciation for how urban actors act globally in
terms of policy. An approach that starts from the notion
of policy mobility as a social process enacted through the
apparently banal practices of bureaucrats, consultants,
and activists, will entail an attention to the representational and comparative practices of these actors and
to related questions of commensurability. It takes, after
all, a particular type of persuasive storytelling, involving
strategic namings and framings, inserted into a specific
context where actors are predisposed to a certain range
of policy options, to convince actors in one city that
their place is commensurate with another to the extent
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that policies formulated and implemented elsewhere
might also work at home. Such an imaginary—a set of
meanings, values, and institutions held in common and
constituting the worldview of a particular community
or society—is not natural, but, like any imaginary, it is
socially produced. Thom, for example, needed to construct a particular persuasive narrative to convince his
Texan clients of the merits of looking to Vancouver for
new downtown development ideas and, clearly, Spaxman and Beasley are at pains to tell just the right story
when offering their Vancouver-inspired vision for the
future of downtown Seattle. Their narratives are mental maps highlighting intercity connection and similarity and, like all maps, they represent the interests and
intentions of their authors more than they offer a neutral window onto the “real” world (Harley 1992; Wood
1992; Pickles 2004). Furthermore, like maps with their
conventions of orientation, shading, labeling, and so
on, narratives of intercity connection and commensurability are legible, understandable, and persuasive to
particular audiences because they employ a set of tropes
and representational techniques with which the audience has prior comfort and familiarity. The audience—
the institutionally embedded demand side—is already
conditioned to look for certain “institutional fixes” and
therefore respond to a particular narrative (Peck 2005;
Peck and Theodore 2008)
For Larner and Le Heron (2002b, 762), this hegemonic imaginary is constituted by “an entire family of conceptually related comparative techniques”
that “explicitly or implicitly involve the imagining
of comparisons across geographically discrete spaces
and encourage social relations to be performed in
the same way in different locations” (Larner and Le
Heron 2002b, 763). Their analysis centers on benchmarking as a particularly powerful and increasingly
prevalent form of calculation that employs carefully
constructed indexes and other numerical measures
to identify quantifiable differences and similarities
among places. Such calculative and quantitative techniques permit, among other things, the disembedding
of specific characteristics from unique places and the
construction of a matrix of abstract measures and
equivalences that “makes the ‘incommensurable commensurable”’ (761) and makes “it possible to think
of organizationally discrete and spatially disparate objects as comparable” (Larner and Le Heron 2004,
214).
To Larner and Le Heron (2002b, 762), benchmarking is an increasingly prevalent activity beyond the business world. “[P]oliticians, academics and community
organizations alike now ‘benchmark’ themselves in pursuit of ‘best practice,”’ they argued. This translation of
the incommensurable into the commensurable constitutes global spaces of emulation and competition, “new
fields of competition made up of ‘best practice’ peers
that other individuals and organizations seek to emulate” (Larner and Le Heron 2004, 215). Ward (2006),
speaking specifically of urban policy, made a similar
point when arguing that “[t]he ‘making-up’ of policy
is . . . a profoundly geographical process, in and through
which different places are constructed as facing similar
problems in need of similar solutions” (70; N. Rose and
Miller 1992).
The “narration” of a city as global—as similar and
connected to others in terms of policy—is, then, materialized through the practices of consultants and other
“experts of truth” (N. Rose 1999). For one Vancouver
planner whose professional reputation is closely tied to
the city’s development model, the point of traveling
to other cities with the “Vancouver story” and of writing about Vancouver’s model is to portray it correctly
and to influence wider discussions about the future of
urbanism.
I feel . . . an importance in the idea that the image of our
city—out to the rest of the world—needs to be at least
an accurate image. And I like to tell the story to the rest
of the world. So I am . . . oriented to the, not the popular
press, I don’t feel too much anxiety about the popular
press . . . but the academic press, the people that are setting
the basic attitude of our practice here, planning practices
here. I want to make sure that we contribute to that.
And secondly I like the city to be a player among those
that are making contributions that are defining urbanism
as we know it today. And I like to think that the city
through our example, and through what we have been
able to experiment with, failed and succeeded in, those
become good contributions toward the bigger debate and
discussions going on about urbanism. (Interview, senior
planner, Vancouver, September 2006)
The products of the work of experts like this
planner—stories, articles, reports, PowerPoint presentations, maps, and so on—reflect, travel through, and
produce circuits of policy knowledge. Thus these comparative technologies create their own spatialities,
marked by the mobilization of knowledge through certain networks and sites of persuasion and by the creation
of specific spatial imaginaries, ways of seeing and acting in the world that “‘stabilise’ (become rationalities,
metadiscourses, logics) as they are communicated in
some way, discussed with others, and then instituted as
Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
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the basis for action and performance” (Larner and Le
Heron 2002b, 760).
The prominence of Vancouver in the minds of policy
actors in certain other cities is evident in an interview
with a planner in Portland, Oregon. Discussion in the
interview turned to his knowledge of and interaction
with Vancouver’s planners as “fellow travelers,” dealing with what he understood as commensurate problems
and formulating solutions that he could see as transferable to his own city:
[If you are] looking for exchange or models or work for you,
you probably want to go to a city that is doing something
[similar]. So the reason that I was calling Vancouver most
recently [was to say], “Hey we are going to hire somebody
for our food program [as Vancouver had recently done
when setting up the city’s Food Policy Council].” So we
just called up, or e-mailed up, and said, “How are you guys
approaching this, what are the work projects . . . ?” That’s
really what we are dealing with today and we want to hear
from somebody else that is doing it. (Interview, planner in
the Office of Sustainable Development, Portland, Oregon,
June 2005)
The comparative technologies and representational
practices of various transfer agents position local policy
models in wider scalar contexts. As such, they construct
urban policy mobilities that operate in and beyond
traditionally defined realms of policymaking, such as
localities and nations. The most mundane practices—
writing a policy report, phoning or e-mailing a colleague
in another city—are, therefore, very important to policy
mobilities as a social, interscalar process.
Something Happens Along the Way, in the Telling,
and on Site
If, indeed, the mobilization of policy among cities
is to be understood as continually enacted, performed,
and practiced, then it is necessary to escape the literalist
trap and to accept that the sociospatial process of circulating policy ideas shapes and reshapes policies. This
assertion draws us to the microspaces of meeting rooms
and other sites of persuasion (cf. Peet 2002) where ideas
are conveyed, as I discuss later, but it also points to some
of the key insights of the mobilities literature.
Mobility, for Cresswell (2001, 20), is a “meaningful
and power-laden geographical phenomenon” involving
“the displacement of an object from A to B” (Cresswell
2006, 4). He made a sharp analytical distinction between mobility and movement, however. “Movement
is the general fact of displacement before the type,
strategies and social implications of that movement
117
are considered” (Cresswell 2001, 14). “In classic migration theory,” he continued by way of example, “the
choice of whether or not to move would be the result
of so-called push and pull factors in A and B respectively. The content of the line between them would
remain unexplored . . . [and] taken for granted” (Cresswell 2006, 2; see Sheller and Urry’s [2006, 212–13]
similar critique of transport research). Approaches to
policy transfer that assume that policies are transferred
fully formed fall into the literalist trap because they
understand transfer in abstract terms, as “desocialised
movement” (Cresswell 2001, 14) rather than as a social process operating through and constitutive of social
space. They take the line for granted.
My purpose is to begin to unpack the lines of movement, the connective social tissue, that constitute urban
policy mobilities. Something happens to policy knowledge along the way, in the telling, and on site as policy
actors learn from each other, from sites they visit, and
from the various institutions and mediators they encounter. We can apprehend elements of this process
through the lens of mobility. I first focus on the activities, copresences, and learning opportunities that
emerge in the spaces of travel. I then highlight the microspaces of persuasion that situate and inform policyoriented travel and learning.
For Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006, 12–13), “the
time spent traveling is not dead time that people always seek to minimize.” Rather than “distinguish[ing]
travel from activities,” they emphasized “that activities
occur while on the move, that being on the move can
involve sets of ‘occasioned’ activities.” These activities
can be stimulating and interesting, they can be a significant part of the reason for traveling, and I suggest
that they characterize fact-finding trips, site visits, and
conference attendance, among other types of “policy
travel.” Policy travel provides a particular type of social
setting and, ideally, a focused retreat-like context in
which to share ideas and to engage with on-the-ground
manifestations of urban policy, such as the Vancouver
landscapes that were presented to delegations from Fort
Worth and Seattle. This particular type of travel is a
form of “material and sociable dwelling-in-motion” in
which airplane, car, and bus journeys and also walking tours through urban developments represent places
of and for social learning activities. They can offer a
“space of release” (Le Heron 2007, 35) where participants can think with and beyond their standard reference points and can involve “specific forms of talk, work
or information-gathering, but [also] simply being connected, maintaining a moving presence with others that
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holds the potential for many different convergences or
divergences of physical presence” (Hannam, Sheller,
and Urry 2006, 13).
One purpose of such fact-finding trips is, of course, to
allow delegations to learn firsthand from their peers in
other cities about the processes, challenges, and benefits
of the formulation and realization of particular policy
models.7 So policy knowledge is not only produced and
performed along the way, through conversations and
copresences, but something happens to policy models
as they are told to delegations on site. Cities that become popular destinations for incoming delegations of
policy actors develop protocols and packaged narratives
for dealing with their visitors in a way that is efficient
for the hosts and also edifying and enjoyable for the
guests. In cities like Vancouver, stories of smart growth
planning and urban livability are well honed, as are
the strategies and logistics for telling them, including
having key figures “ready to go” on relatively short notice, knowing which stories and which tours are best
for which delegations of “policy tourists” (Ward 2007),
when to involve the mayor or senior staff, and how
to evaluate the seriousness of various delegations (Interviews with planners: Austin 2000; Portland 2005;
Vancouver 2006; see McCann 2004).
A Vancouver planner emphasizes the importance of
site visits, rather than simply learning at a distance,
as he discusses his department’s approach to hosting
visiting delegations:
[T]he best thing that can happen to people is just let
them go experience it. I can interpret that for them, I
much prefer to interpret after they’ve had the experience
themselves. . . . I’ve found that when people go out and
experience the place, the richness of their experience is
actually way more [compelling] than my stories. . . . And
then, after they’ve seen it, they are really good at taking it
where they want to take it. I tell them a bit of the story,
give them some documents, but they then ask the questions that really matter. The Americans ask one kind of
question. Europeans ask another kind of question. People
from Asian countries ask different questions. (Interview,
senior planner, Vancouver, September 2006)
In turn, members of the delegations shape these narratives and experiences as they retell them on their return home. They are generally expected to return with
coherent stories to tell about what they learned, either
in verbal form or in written reports.
Here again, I think we can turn some of the mobilities
perspective on travel activities—those of tourists, for
example—to the task of conceptualizing policy travel.
Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006, 15) noted that
“[m]uch travel and communication involves the active
development and performances of ‘memory’ [involving
the] active employment of photographs, postcards,
letters, images, guides, souvenirs and objects.” They
suggested that these images and objects are carried with
people and used to “reassemble memories, practices
and even landscapes.” If these are the sorts of objects
gathered by migrants, tourists, and day-trippers, what
objects might be carried by urban policy tourists, intent
on reassembling their site visits for their own benefit
and for that of their home audience? Photographs,
video and audio recordings, maps, sketches, diagrams,
plans, policy documents, brochures, PowerPoint presentations (either in electronic form or in printed notes
pages), and, perhaps most important, word-of-mouth
stories (Wolman 1992) are among the artifacts of the
site that are likely to accompany policy actors on trips
home. These sources are then assembled into a set of
“actionable” ideas that, when deployed in other cities,
can influence their development. Time spent traveling
is alive with possibilities. Things happen along the way.
The possibilities are not limitless, however. They are
structured by the local conditions and institutional contexts in which the various transfer agents are embedded.
A second related contribution—and, again, one
that resonates strongly with long-standing traditions
of geographical thought dealing with mobility, fixity,
global senses of place, and economic geographies of
knowledge—is the argument that mobilities operate
through nodes and are predicated on the existence
of fixed infrastructures and sites. As Urry (2004, 28)
put it, “all social life [involves] various kinds of connections sustained at a distance but with intermittent
meetings.” Mobilities, then, “involve occasioned, intermittent face-to-face conversations and meetings within
certain places at certain moments that seem obligatory for the sustaining of families, friendship, workgroups, businesses and leisure organizations” (Hannam,
Sheller, and Urry 2006, 14–15; cf. Amin and Cohendet
1999, 2004; Grabher 2004; Vallance 2007, on “relational proximities” and “swift trust” and “ephemeral
ties” in economic geographies of knowledge). In the
context of policy mobilities, these sites of copresence,
learning, and persuasion include the spaces of factfinding trips. Clearly, they also involve the spaces of
conferences and similar meetings. The meeting rooms,
hallways, cafes, bars, and restaurants of conferences are
what Larner and Le Heron (2002b, 765) termed “globalizing ‘microspaces’ ” where expertise about globally significant best practice is deployed and discussed, where
lessons are learned, where trust is developed, where
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
reputations are made or unmade (reputations of best
cities, successful policies, and hot policy gurus), and
where acquaintances, or “weak ties,” are made among
copresent conferees, thus connecting what would otherwise be socially and spatially isolated policy communities (Granovetter 1983). Mobile policies are, then,
shaped and given momentum in the telling of stories
during meetings.
Ward has noted the importance of meetings, seminars, symposia, workshops, and conferences for the mobilization of the business improvement district (BID)
model into the United Kingdom. He noted the way that
British trade and government organizations organized
these sorts of events in conjunction with the roll-out of
early pilot BID schemes. “Over 100 local government
officers and business representatives attended these [national seminars]. Local meetings were also held in the
22 pilots, at which more detailed concerns over local
specifics were discussed. At both types of meetings delegates learnt about BIDs, often through listening about
US case studies” (Ward 2006, 66–67). These meetings
had profound impacts. By attending them, “local public
sector officials in a range of UK towns and cities began the process of learning. Existing subjectivities and
rationalities were remade in and through these events,
and through the subject-making exercises the state as a
peopled set of institutions begun to be restructured along
neoliberal lines” (67). As this example suggests, and as I
have already argued with reference to informational infrastructures like professional organizations, decisions
about how and where to hold meetings are strategic,
offering benefits to the organizing institutions, the attendees, and the local hosts.
Take, for example, the Third World Urban Forum
(WUF III), coordinated by UN Habitat and held in
Vancouver in June 2006. Funded primarily by UN
Habitat and the Canadian Government, WUF III was
intended to support Habitat’s mission “to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities
with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all”
(UN Habitat n.d.-b). The organization engages in a
number of activities around this goal and, since 1997,
has had an explicit focus on policy transfer through
its Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme,
which focuses on “identifying, disseminating and applying lessons learned from Best Practices to ongoing
training, leadership and policy development activities”
through “documented and peer-reviewed best practices,
examples of good policies and enabling legislation, case
studies and briefs and transfer methodologies” (UN
Habitat n.d.-a). UN Habitat has positioned itself as
119
a key global informational infrastructure that mediates
urban policy mobilities and constructs global spaces of
comparison and commensurability.
WUF III attracted over 9,600 delegates from one
hundred countries to Vancouver. It was dominated by
governments (31 percent of delegates, 16 percent of
which were from local authorities), nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs; 23 percent), professional and research organizations (15 percent), and the private sector (12 percent; UN Habitat 2006a, 7) and involved
five days of meetings, including traditional plenaries,
round tables, and paper sessions, and also more than 160
“networking events,” intended to provide “an opportunity to . . . build knowledge, strengthen partnerships
and share ideas and best practices” (UN Habitat 2006a,
11–12). The event was clearly perceived by its organizers to be the sort of node, or globalized microspace,
where best practice peers could understand and build on
their commensurate problems and experiences. As the
official post-Forum summary puts it, “[p]articipants were
keen to share ideas, network and forge new alliances
through both formal and informal meetings with partners, and viewed the Forum not as a place where declarations and plans of action were endorsed but where
experiences were shared” (UN Habitat 2006a, 7).
There were at least two reasons why Vancouver was
chosen to host WUF III. First, the Forum commemorated the first UN Habitat conference, held in Vancouver in 1976—an event that produced the Vancouver
Declaration, still a key text for the organization (UN
Habitat 1976). Second, as suggested earlier, organizations like UN Habitat choose the sites of their meetings
carefully with reference to the connections between
their agendas and the characteristics of host cities. Vancouver’s reputation dovetailed with UN Habitat’s focus
on urban sustainability. As the program outline document argued, “[a] leader in sustainable urbanization,
Vancouver . . . is widely considered one of the world’s
most livable cities” (UN Habitat 2006c, 8). This scripting of the city was reinforced by Habitat’s executive
director:
Canada and the city of Vancouver have a consistent record
as a wellspring of novel ideas for sustainable urbanization.
They are therefore, the most appropriate choice for the
Third Session of the World Urban Forum to generate
new ideas and actions in support of our common quest
for more just, inclusive and environmentally sound cities.
(Tibaijuka, in UN Habitat 2006b, 2)
The high hopes of the organizers seemed to be confirmed by the end of the conference. Delegates agreed,
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McCann
the official summary argues, “that risk-taking and the
pursuit of innovation must characterize municipal leadership if cities are to achieve sustainable development.
Vancouver’s example in taking the lead in such areas
as air and water quality, public transit and planning
was mentioned often in this context” (UN Habitat
2006a, 5).
Within Vancouver’s policy and political circles,
WUF III was welcomed for many reasons. It was, of
course, a chance for local policy actors to network with
global peers. Moreover, it was an opportunity for many
of those actors to engage in what might be called policy
boosterism—a specific form of city marketing involving
the active promotion of policies, programs, or practices
in order to enhance their reputation among, and to encourage their adoption by, a wider community of policy
actors (McCann 2009). As already noted, Vancouver’s
planners, politicians, and consultants have been assiduous in educating colleagues elsewhere about what some
of the more energetic policy boosters have taken to
calling “Vancouverism” (Berelowitz 2005; Price 2005a,
2005b; Yuen 2005; Harcourt, Cameron, and Rossiter
2007; Sharp and Boddy 2008). In planning documents
and meetings prior to WUF III, local organizers talked of
the opportunity for delegates to experience Vancouver
as a laboratory for sustainable urban development. At
the Forum, local, provincial, and national politicians
consistently invoked the city’s high ranking on global
livability rankings (“Top spot reminds us we have it
pretty good” 2004; Beauchesne 2005; Economist Intelligence Unit 2005; Mercer Human Resource Consulting 2005) to support their view of the city as globally
significant (Sullivan 2006; UN Habitat 2006a).
Furthermore, numerous conference sessions, with titles including “Planning Successful Sustainable Cities:
Case Study Vancouver, Canada,” focused on what
Punter (2003) has called “the Vancouver achievement”
and featured many of the leading lights of the city’s urban policy community. As a senior Vancouver planner
put it:
[I]t was great for the city. It was great to have all the
people here. It was probably just as important for what
they experienced than what anyone told them. Because
the city kind of tells its own story. . . . I can’t tell you how
many groups and individuals approached me in the . . . bar
during . . . the World Urban Forum, who said, “I’ve gone
to the sessions, I’ve seen everything, but I still don’t know
how you make it happen, and I want to know the bread
and butter and the tinkering, the mechanics of it because
there is something there that I want to take back to my
city.” (Interview, senior planner, Vancouver, September
2006)
Strategically placed at the entrances to the downtown convention center where WUF III was held were
packages of nine glossy brochures produced by the City
of Vancouver with the purpose of allowing delegates
to experience the city firsthand. Four of these documents, with titles like “Introducing Our City and How
It Works” and “How We Plan: Inclusivity in Decision
Making,” sketched the city’s planning and governance
practices. The other five outlined walking and transit tours of the city’s neighborhoods with an emphasis on extant examples of policy innovation. All nine
were prominently branded with a green logo, showing
a leaf superimposed on a silhouette of the city’s skyline
and the inscription, “Livable City—Sustainable Future”
(City of Vancouver 2006).
Conferences, meetings, and fact-finding visits are,
then, key relational sites that are central to the social
process of teaching and learning about policy and, thus,
to the contingent, cumulative, and emergent knowledge production processes that coconstitute urban policy mobilities (Le Heron 2007; Le Heron and Lewis
2007; Lewis, Larner, and Le Heron 2008). They offer
opportunities for urban policy actors and informational
infrastructures to influence and benefit from global circuits of urban policy knowledge and allow concrete
settings for researching how these global relational geographies are produced.
Questions and Considerations Toward a
Research Agenda
The purpose of this article is to outline an analytical
approach to the global circulation of urban policy models, knowledge, and ideas. This approach is influenced,
on the one hand, by geographical political economy
arguments about the need to understand specific social interactions in terms of wider processes, contexts,
forces, and structures and the related need to maintain a dual focus on fixity and flow, or territoriality
and relationality, in the study of society. I combine
these insights with arguments about the need to pay
close attention to the embodied practices, representations, and expertise through which policy knowledge is
developed, mobilized, and operationalized in different
contexts. The notion of mobilities captures this conceptual nexus and, thus, I have employed it here as a rubric
under which to focus on the “local globalness” of urban
policymaking.
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
This discussion suggests that our understanding of urban policy mobilities can benefit from a “global ethnography” that entails “a shift from studying ‘sites’ [e.g.,
Vancouver] to studying ‘fields,’ that is, the relations between sites” while maintaining one site as a “primary
perspective” (Gowan and Ó Riain 2000, xii; Burawoy
2000, 30–31). This “extended case” method involves
ethnographic engagement with participants and processes, careful attention to the external forces and connections shaping specific sites, and, as a result of this
work, the extension of theory (Burawoy 2000, 26–28;
Burawoy et al. 1991). The Vancouver case indicates
that there is much more research to be done on the character and implications of how urban actors act globally.
Such a research agenda can be built at the intersection
of the theoretical and methodological considerations
identified by Burawoy and his co-authors, but it must
be specified further. In the remaining paragraphs I set
out a number of questions and considerations that go
some way to constituting an agenda for research on
policy mobilities.
Mobilities
It is important to begin by considering the concept of
mobilities itself. It is a relatively new one in the social
science lexicon but one that has proliferated, largely
due to the productivity of a small number of scholars
who have applied the concept to specific topics and
who have sought to codify and institutionalize their approach through programmatic statements, the creation
of a research center (CeMoRe n.d.), and the publication of a journal, Mobilities. This energetic promotion
of an idea might be viewed skeptically, particularly in
a context where mobilities can be seen to draw heavily
from already existing work on scale, relationality, and
the fixity–mobility dialectic. Yet, mobilities scholars are
clear on their intellectual debts and mobilities is hardly
the first concept to be promoted by communities of interested scholars or to take on the characteristics of a
fad. Therefore, the mobilities approach should not be
dismissed out of hand. Rather, the concept should be
seen and utilized for what it is: one that when deployed
critically and in combination with others, allows useful,
but by no means complete, insight into a specific set of
social processes.
The use of any concept has implications, of course.
A focus on mobilities might tempt an uncritical and
celebratory stance toward humans’ abilities to move
around the planet. Yet, more sober analyses emphasize
that mobility is stratified and conditioned by access to
121
resources and by one’s identity (classed, racialized, gendered, etc.) as well as by one’s embeddedness in particular institutional and political contexts that define a constrained set of potential pathways for action (Peck and
Theodore 2008). Not everyone has the same ability to
pay for Internet access, conference fees, or plane tickets,
and many people, when they move, do so because they
have been forced. The mobilities literature, acknowledging critiques of the romanticization and uncritical
acceptance of mobility as a given (Tsing 2000; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006), seems intent on avoiding the uncritical glamorization of mobility. The point
about stratification is worth emphasizing nonetheless as
a key conceptual consideration. In the context of urban policy mobilities, specifically, it underscores both
the need to critically conceptualize urban policy actors’
differing levels of fixity–mobility and differential, institutionally conditioned access to global circuits of policy
knowledge and also to conceptualize policy transfer and
policy learning as sociospatially uneven and selective
processes.
Specific questions that arise in this context include
the following: Why do some ideas and models travel
whereas others do not? Certainly, the policy transfer literature indicates a number of structural reasons
why transfer becomes popular at certain times. For
example, reductions in state staffing budgets coupled
with intensified competitive pressures and shortened
deadlines increase the attractiveness of adopting readymade, quick-fix, off-the-shelf policies from other jurisdictions or from private consultants. This “fast policy
transfer” (Peck and Theodore 2001, 429) is also facilitated by international organizations that encourage or
force the adoption of certain policy models (Peet 2002).
These structural conditions are coupled with the rise of
cadres of policy consultants whose activities are motivated by the need to gain contracts, by considerations
of professional reputation, and by the belief that they
can help improve cities.
A second question involves the geographical unevenness of policy transfer. Not all policies, even ones
that are locally successful, are mobilized or designated
as best practices. Similarly, not all cities feature in the
mental maps of policymakers or international institutions when they identify exemplars of best practice.
Furthermore, certain policy consultants “go global,”
whereas most do not. Why does this unevenness exist and what are its implications? It would be too simple
to assume that certain best practices, cities, and consultants “naturally” rise to the top. Access to resources
such as time, travel budgets, the media, translation
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McCann
services, and cultural capital would presumably make
it easier for certain policy boosters to articulate their
knowledge widely, and uneven access to those same resources would condition which urban actors are able to
learn from global conversations about good policy. One
might surmise that, despite the efforts of organizations
like UN Habitat, poorer municipalities would be less
likely to contribute to or learn from global policy mobilities. This is a hypothesis in need of further testing,
however.8
It is the case that differential access to resources
and the specific character of certain policy prescriptions condition the opportunities for certain actors and
policies to have an impact beyond their home cities.
Yet, there is evidence that subaltern groups and others
proposing counterhegemonic visions of urban policy do
find ways to act globally. The travels of consultants,
politicians, policy professionals, and their policy models
are in many ways paralleled, if not necessarily equaled,
by the mobilities of NGOs and activists who find ways to
disseminate alternative and innovate policy prescriptions. Indeed, these actors frequently inhabit and seek
to utilize the infrastructures that also make more traditional policy transfer possible, particularly the Internet.
Questions of how and with what implications subaltern
groups, such as drug users (McCann 2008) or human
rights activists (Bosco 2001), for example, are able to
“inhabit” the same infrastructures as policy elites are
worthy of further consideration.9
These questions indicate the need to understand
urban policy mobilities neither in terms of fetishized
mobile objects or free-floating fields of transfer but to
conceptualize them as produced by the social, spatial, institutional, ideological, and political contexts
in which they are developed, applied, transferred, and
adopted. As such, the study of the sites and processes of transfer must include analysis of the forces
that condition them. Yet, an attention to these forces,
tendencies, and structures involves the danger of objectifying them and “making them appear inevitable
and natural” (Burawoy 2000, 29). One of Burawoy’s
strategies for dealing with this problem seems apropos
in this context. He endeavors to “see global [macro,
external, or extralocal] forces as themselves the product of contingent social processes.” This conceptualization then leads to a methodological stance: “Here
forces become the topic of investigation; they are examined as the product of flows of people, things, and
ideas, that is, the global connections between sites”
(29).
Territoriality and Relationality
The integration of theory and method is, then, central to the development of this research agenda. Conceptualizing sites of policy transfer as global-relational
allows a move toward a form of global ethnography
through, but not confined to, a primary case. This strategy might raise questions about the efficacy of the single case study as a source of general or generalizable
statements. There are strong and, for me, convincing
statements in the literature about the utility of the
single-case method (Burawoy et al. 1991; Burawoy et al.
2000; Herbert 2000; Flyvbjerg 2006). Comparative case
studies also offer potential insights into the study of
mobile policies (Ward 2008), as do multisited ethnographies (Marcus 1998; Olds 2001) and detailed ethnographic studies of knowledge networks (Riles 2001).
The methods chosen in a specific study will relate to the
conceptualizations employed and the empirical questions asked. Various methods, in various combinations,
will emerge. Each combination will paint a somewhat
different but not necessarily incompatible picture of the
character and consequences of urban policy mobilities
and global circuits of knowledge.
For example, questions regarding the structural and
historical contexts within which contemporary urban policy mobilities have emerged can be addressed
through the analysis of policy documents, Web sites,
and blogs, coupled with semistructured qualitative interviews with key informants. Analysis of these sorts of
data might then involve some form of discourse analysis (Lees 2004). Questions about the character and frequency of policy travel and intercity networking might
entail a set of quantitative and survey methods. Mail
or Internet-based questionnaires might produce a broad
sense of what city officials get from conferences and site
visits (Wolman and Page 2000) and how their travel
is patterned and funded. This method would provide a
general understanding, for example, of which city governments tend to fund fact-finding trips, which cities
are most visited by delegations, and at which scale
(regional, national, global) intercity connections are
strongest. Analysis of these data might not only entail standard statistical methods and the mapping of
the results (graduated circle maps of the most visited
cities, for example) but might also entail network visualization or mapping of policy networks and knowledge
domains. They might identify key locations, policies,
and individuals who seem to be central to discussions over high-quality and transferrable urban policies,
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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
formal and informal linkages among cities, common or
divergent goals, and clusters of organizations around
particular agendas (Brandes et al. 1999; Skupin 2004).
The dualism between these qualitative and quantitative methods is often usefully transcended, of course,
and these methods could also be complemented by
ethnographic methods, defined by some form of participation and observation (Herbert 2000) and intended
to understand the social process of transfer and learning within and among communities of practitioners.
It is on this aspect of policy mobilities that much of
this article has focused, as it argues for the utility of
semistructured qualitative interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic observation of site visits, factfinding trips, meetings with visiting delegations and
consultants, and various types of conferences, symposiums, and forums. Although there is literature that
explicitly discusses anthropological or ethnographic aspects of policy research (e.g., Shore and Wright 1997),
and although a great deal of the geography and urban
studies literature on urban policy and politics relies on
forms of qualitative and ethnographic inquiry, there is
remarkably little scholarship on how conferences might
be studied ethnographically as research sites, where dispersed communities of policy actors come together in
one place to strengthen their ties, share knowledge, and
so on. More work is needed in this area if the importance
of conferences and site visits to urban policy mobilities
is to be understood. Similarly, if travel, including policy travel, is to be understood as productive rather than
dead time, ethnographic research—being with delegations on trips elsewhere, in meetings, and on site—is
needed on these mobile communities to better comprehend how exactly such time is productive for urban
policymaking. This, of course, demands a great deal of
time and funding from the researcher, which could be
why it constitutes a gap in the literature!
A concern with global ethnography emphasizes conceptual considerations once more. Specifically, the need
to employ a methodological lens that focuses simultaneously on specific sites and on global forces, connections,
and imaginaries reflects a concern with how to theorize
the relationships between fixity and mobility, or territoriality and relationality, in the context of geographies
of policy. A conceptualization of the productive tension between fixity and mobility is, of course, central
to Harvey’s (1982) historical–geographical materialist
approach to capitalist development. Notions of territoriality and relationality have, for the most part, been
less closely linked in the study of cities, however (but
see Beaumont and Nicholls 2007). Many political geog-
123
raphers have tended to emphasize the role of the former,
whereas others have, in varying ways, sought to highlight the mutually constitutive relationships between
cities and global processes. The mobilities perspective
offers the opportunity to think about contemporary urban policymaking and politics in terms of the connections between territoriality and relationality because it
emphasizes that although knowledge might be understood to “flow” around the world, it is only “actionable”
and productive when it is embedded or territorialized in
specific social, spatial, and institutional contexts (Peck
and Theodore 2008). If, as Beaumont and Nicholls
(2007, 2559) argued, “[t]erritories do not come at the
expense of extensive networks and flows but, rather,
they are constituted by and contribute to these social
networks,” then I would argue it is through the careful
empirical tracing of social interactions across various
scales that conceptualizations of relationality and territoriality can be further developed (N. Rose 1999, 12–13;
Peck 2003; McCann and Ward 2010).
Research might focus, for example, on questions of
politics and power as, for example, territorially dependent growth coalitions engage with global circuits of
policy knowledge to adopt policies that serve their interests. In turn, this leads to the question of what are the local political implications of the increased normalization
of interurban policy comparison and transfer? No urban
policy is ever universally accepted. Any policy serves
different interests differently or favors the interests of
some over others. Therefore, policies that encourage
downtown residential development are frequently opposed as gentrifying strategies that displace low-income
residents in favor of wealthy condo dwellers, for example. If such policies are lauded and copied globally as
best practice in terms of urban revitalization and sustainability, questions arise about the political force and
legitimacy such positive attention lends them in the
localities where they were developed. Is it more difficult to question or change local policies when they
have been branded as best not only by local officials
but also by a range of other cities and organizations?
Similarly, when a policy model is transferred into a city
from elsewhere and has been anointed as best, is it again
more difficult to question its precepts, implications, and
attendant interests?
Furthermore, I have argued that two crucial elements
of policy mobilities are site visits and conference attendance; that face-to-face interactions in these globalizing
microspaces play a central role in shaping policies and
policy learning. This leads to another set of questions
related to territorialized politics and global relations.
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McCann
First, what are the political characteristics and implications of policy travel when it is defined as necessary for
fact-finding versus when it is defined as wasteful “junketing?” Accusations of junketing are common in local
politics and the study of this political discourse in the
context of global policy mobilities offers the opportunity to extend the case out beyond the merely local.
Second, what might be the impacts on policy learning and on “local” politics of periods of increased oil
prices and related rises in the cost of travel, such as
the period prior to the current global economic crisis?
Does attendance at policy conferences or the number
and size of fact-finding delegations decline as costs rise
and municipal budgets are tightened? Do city officials,
consultants, and activists see the quality of information
gained from other sources like the Internet, phone calls,
video conferences, or printed reports as being equal to
the quality of understanding gained from on-site learning (thus allowing them to reduce their policy travel)?
Third, how do those engaged in policy travel, those
who travel elsewhere to teach or learn about policy,
attach meaning to and practically negotiate questions
of budgetary responsibility and environmental ethics?
Do popular worries about the environmental impacts of
air travel, for example, influence decisions about policy travel, perhaps particularly for transfer agents whose
teaching and learning is directed toward questions of
sustainability? These and other questions will, as I have
suggested, point to a range of methods ranging from
surveys to ethnographic engagement with individuals
who might not be willing to talk about ethical considerations, for example, until they have developed trust
with the researcher. In turn, these questions offer the
opportunity to further theorize the power-laden processes and forces that constitute global circuits of policy
knowledge.
recent symposium in the Urban Affairs Review and various critiques of the global or world cities approach have
suggested (McCann 2002, 2004; Robinson 2002, 2006;
Dear and Dahmann 2008; Mollenkopf 2008; Simpson
and Kelly 2008). It would be equally problematic to
position Vancouver as the center of global policy innovation, and this has certainly not been my intention.
A resort to a form of synecdoche—where a part is
represented as standing for the whole—is conceptually
problematic (McCann 2002). Among other things, it
involves a dangerous tendency toward diffusionism. For
Blaut (1987, 1993), diffusionism involves a belief that
inventiveness is scarce and concentrated in a few advanced and progressive places from which innovations
flow to the rest of the world. Diffusionism is “spatial
elitism,” Blaut (1993, 12) argued. It inscribes a geography of center and periphery on the world, justifying
perspectives and practices that denigrate and exploit
the innovations of the many in service of the few. Now,
Blaut’s argument is concerned with Eurocentrism and
colonialism through history, but his admonition against
spatial elitism is relevant to the study of contemporary urban policy mobilities. There is a distinct danger,
after all, that accounts of specific cities, their policy
innovations, and their prominence in global conversations about best practices can position them as “special”
places (naturally) endowed with uncommon amounts of
innovatory capacity. Local policy boosters would likely
welcome this sort of account. It would be an uncritical
and politically problematic approach, however, because
it would fail to address the wider historical, geographical, cultural, and political-economic contexts in which
policy innovations are developed and mobilized. It is
at the nexus of specific case study sites and these wider
forces that further research on urban policy mobilities
can best be directed.
Dangers of Diffusionism
The purpose of a global ethnographic approach is to
free this type of process-oriented research from the “narrow boundaries of the traditional ethnographic ‘site”’
(Gowan and Ó Riain 2000, xii). Therefore, I will conclude with a cautionary observation about the conceptual difficulties of extending the details of a specific case
back out to the global. A great deal of recent urban studies has been marked by problematic attempts to assert
one city as the quintessence of much wider processes of
urbanization and as the place where most noteworthy
innovation occurs. Los Angeles is the obvious example of this tendency, but it is only one of many, as a
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to those who agreed to be interviewed
for the project. Thanks to Stephanie Campbell and
Rini Sumartojo for research assistance, to Jamie Peck
and Kevin Ward who provided very helpful comments
on an earlier draft, to three anonymous Annals reviewers, and to Audrey Kobayashi. Elements of the article were presented at the Association of American
Geographers meetings in San Francisco (2007), and
Boston (2008), and at the Institut für Humangeographie, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Germany
(2008). The research was funded by an Social Sciences
Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge
and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Standard
Grant, a Simon Fraser University (SFU)/SSHRC Institutional Grant, an SFU President’s Research Grant,
and an SFU Endowed Research Fellowship. The usual
disclaimers apply.
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Notes
1. The impact of these circuits on specific places is not only
a contemporary phenomenon and any discussion of urban
development in this context must acknowledge the long
history of largely unequal exchanges of knowledge around
the world. The landscapes of cities that are, or have been,
on both sides of colonial connections exhibit clear evidence of exchange and interaction (Saunier 2002; Nasr
and Volait 2003).
2. These activities have also been referred to as lessondrawing (R. Rose 1991, 1993; Robertson 1991), emulation (Bennett 1991), imitation (Jacoby 2001), importation
(Hoyt 2006), and even pinching (Schneider and Ingram
1988).
3. Again, this notion of copresence, or “co-gredience” (Harvey 1996, 259–60), has been a feature of geographical
literatures on place and scale (Merrifield 1993; Amin and
Graham 1997; McCann 2002).
4. As will become clear later, the tensions between physical
proximity and “relational proximity” (Amin and Cohendet 1999, 2004) in the production of economic knowledge
are also in the production of urban policy knowledge.
5. Burawoy and his coauthors suggested that this approach
must, for logistical reasons, almost always take one site as
its primary vantage point (Burawoy et al. 2000).
6. Starting here with local actors is not intended to suggest
that the local is the most real, authentic, or necessary
scale.
7. It is important to note that, in all likelihood, visiting
delegations will only be presented with the positives of a
situation and are less likely to hear from local critics or
skeptical evaluators of a program (see Wolman 1992).
8. It is important to acknowledge that cities in the global
south—Curitiba or Porto Alegre, for example—have significant influence on policy thinking in the north (Baiocchi 2003; Moore 2007).
9. It is worth emphasizing that counterhegemonic groups
also see the need to build their own separate infrastructures, such as the World Social Forum, to aid in the mobilization of their policy ideas and political agendas.
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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada, e-mail: emccann@sfu.ca.